XR Lab at MCM

19/12/2025

The metaverse is about to lose another one of its backbones. Netflix purchased avatar creator Ready Player Me -- and withdraw its creations which brought so much life to virtual worlds such as VRChat from circulation. Let us guess: We will never see those avatars and their creations again./THT

"Following the acquisition, Ready Player Me will be winding down its services on January 31, 2026, including its online avatar creation tool, PlayerZero."

The gaming startup will allow Netflix subscribers to create avatars that can extend across gaming titles.

03/11/2025

Next week is this year's virtual highlight: The team of University of Münster's XRLab at MCM looks forward to have the best of times with YOU at this year's IMMERSIVX X festival.

Only real in virtuality.

If you have a headset and are curious, visit https://immersive-x.de

21/03/2025

Social VR is such a powerful way to overcome the distances that separate us. Through the magic of social presence in virtual realities, people from all over the world can overcome the limits that geography confronts us with.

And it is such a massively underused approach in almost all parts of business, and life -- including education. That's why XR Lab at MCM director Prof. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau was so excited when his colleague Paolo Granata from the University of Toronto told him about his GLOBAL CLASSROOM initiative -- the idea of making students from leading universities to defy spatial boundaries and meet, just for an hour or two, in a shared virtual space.

Last week the professors were finally able to celebrate the premiere of GLOBAL CLASSROOM: Prof. Granata's students put on their headsets and traveled from Canada to Münster, Germany, bridging some 6,000 kilometers in the blink of an eye. Not by the turbines of a plane, but by immersion. Undergraduates and doctoral students from Münster welcomed their Canadian guests and toured some virtual attractions with them: the home of the Marketing Center Münster at the Stadtgraben, a lecture hall with a view on Münster's Aasee, and a museum located right at the heart of Münster's famous Prinzipalmarkt. [Yes, Liam Mckill, our visitors LOVED the museum you have crafted, and particularly the 360 tiny planet videos in it!]

There are still challenges (not all avatars and user names were found to be equally well suited for social interactions, finding the right time to address both the time difference and the different academic calendar), but learning is part of higher education, isn't it? ;-) We considered it a great start of a journey that will make memorable encounters happen and might guide our students to places not even Buzz Lightyear has yet traveled to.

Besides, if you're a university educator and are curious about contributing to the GLOBAL CLASSROOM initiative, get in touch with Prof. Granata or Prof. Hennig-Thurau.

12/02/2025

Apple vs Meta: A battle of avatars made in Münster!

The team of the eXperimental Reality Lab at the Marketing Center Münster was truly stunned when we recently experienced Apple's AVP avatar for the first time. The avatar (which Apple calls a "persona", but that doesn't change what it actually is) requires some tweaking, but the result is certainly one of a kind, in a truly impressive way.

But avatars are not made for themselves, but for a purpose: To be USED by us. That's what XRLab@MCM director Thorsten Hennig-Thurau alias "ProfTHT", together with fellow XRLab members Björn Ognibeni and Lars Grewe, headed out for: In search of the social experiences that the Apple avatar, and its counterpart by Meta, enable. Because that's why avatars exist, regardless whether they are designed by Apple, Meta, or someone else: For transforming the digital realm into a SOCIAL reality!

So who wins the battle -- Apple, the challenger in the extended reality space, or Meta, the incumbent? It's complicated and depends on what you and your virtual ego want to do. It's complicated because it turns out that filling the digital existence with valuable experiences is certainly not the strong side of Apple, at least not as of February 2025.

But feel free to watch yourself!

10/12/2024

LEGO invests in the Fortnite metaverse in a substantial way. /THT

Make new friends, move into your dream home, and build your lifestyle in LEGO® Fortnite Brick Life!

06/12/2024

The metaverse as of 2024 is all these things -- and so much more.

From November 26-28, 2024, the fourth edition of the IMMERSIVE X, probably the world's most ambitious metaverse conference, took place -- exclusively in the ...

17/11/2024

Crafting an article that introduced the metaverse to marketing scholars and was not only published by the FT-50 A outlet Journal of the Academy of Marketing Sciene, but also awarded as Best Articles of 2023 of that journal (and downloaded 33k times!).

Writing another article that provided evidence that such such virtual collaborations can outperform those via Zoom when done right, being accepted and coming out soon in the well-respected (and much read) Business Horizons.

And composing another article that rigorously explores the powers of half three-dimensional, half two-dimensional teams that hast entered the academic launch pad.

After accomplishing all of that and so many other things, such as developing and leading our (pretty big) XRLab at the Marketing Center Münster, in just three and a half years, Nilusha Aliman defended her doctoral thesis with remarkable brilliance last week, greatly impressing committee members Maik Hammerschmidt, Markus Dertwinkel-Kalt, as well as MCM's Thorsten Hennig-Thurau.

The XRLab congratulates Nilusha🎉 and all the best for your next steps. You have made our lab what is is today, and we are quite thankful for your multifaceted contributions. It was a true blast working with you! The XRLab team can't wait to see you in the metaverse and beyond!! ;-)
/THT